I’ve had Dreamhost for a couple of months and I’d like to get some input. I’m building my website and will be launching shortly. I’m using the “shared” hosting and I’m curious as to what the PS will get me. I’m hosting a forum with Gallery and Blogs, not much traffic now but good chance of it growing. I’m willing to kick out a few bucks for the PS I’m looking at starting out small with 300MHZ and 300MB RAM reserved.

No BS how much of an improvement is this over the standard shared hosting?

“They must find it difficult …
Those who have taken authority as the truth,
rather than the truth as the authority.”

I went for PS at the minimum levels just to get a guarantee that my web server won’t be affected by the runaway processes from bad neighbors - they’re not bad people, they just either need to optimize or get over their traffic spike.

One thing I did notice is that I’m now hyper-aware of the memory utilization of my sites.

BTW, support mentioned to me that if I have critical sites and non-critical site, I can open two accounts/plans and have one be a regular shared hosting account and have one be a PS account. This way I can have save some money by staying on a cheaper PS level even if I have a couple of sites that can be fatter but where occasional slowdowns would not be the end of the world. I’ve been thinking about throwing my Gallery site out of my PS account and onto a new shared hosting account, but so far I’m within my PS limits even with all my sites on my PS server.

Practically speaking, my sites now have very predictable performance. They weren’t heavyweight to begin with, but response time would still spike when the server was under heavy load. I’ve never personally seen my site be slow after switching to PS so I guess you have to call me a happy DreamHost customer.

I too am considering a switch to PS at some future time. My site is also in development.

While someone may have quantified input (perhaps X% reduction in access time), I don’t see the decision purely as a numbers evaluation. Shared and PS are different environments. I see three reasons for switching to PS:

A site with too big a footprint (CPU, memory usage) will not “play well with others”. If performance degrades under load to the point a site impacts the other users on the shared host, DH will likely take action. This may include disabling your site. In this case, PS benefits you by providing a “larger than fair share” of a system compared to the shared environment. If your site grows at some predictable rate, you will be able to choose a time to upgrade to PS, and increase resources as needed. There is an Achilles’ heel, though. While the resource allocation is guaranteed, it is also capped. A big spike in visitors will still bring the site to a crawl. At least your former neighbors will not be screaming at support .

A site which needs a reasonable level of performance (as defined by the site owner) may be impacted by other sites in a shared hosting environment. Putting your site on a PS insulates your site from the performance hit caused by other sites on a shared system. While there is no SLA at DH, I would expect a PS to provide more stability/predictability when compared to the shared environment.

If you want to install/run a service/process not permitted in a shared environment, DH may permit it on a PS.

Concerning caps: The cpu and memory resources are burstable above your plan limits. Not sure how often you can exceed limits before they require a plan upgrade, however.

I don’t think they count how often you exceed that limit. It’s just that you can only count on that at least the limits which you ordered are always available, if you need more and more resources are available you’re in luck. If you tend to always go over you limits you’ll notice you’re site being slow and and some point you’ll just have to go and upgrade.

Jan

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